5 Ways To Maximise Your ROI While Outsourcing The Supply Chain

Worldwide, supply chains are getting more complex due to globalisation of sourcing and selling, proliferations of SKUs to satisfy customers’ choices and need for speed and accuracy for perfect order fulfilment. As a result, more and more businesses are seeking the help of supply chain consultants who can assist them in the optimisation of their supply chains. Many times, the objective of supply chain optimisation project is to make the supply chain lean in its various functions like warehousing, freight forwarding, land transportations and distribution. While the businesses have many options, smart businesses know and understand that to maximise returns from the optimisation project, it is best to hire consultants who have on-ground experience. These supply chain consultants not only understand the business operations better but also give inputs, which are practical and implementable on-ground. Further, many supply chain optimisation consultants are also willing to take responsibility for the implementation to give proof of concept, giving much more confidence to the customer on maximising return on their investment.

Read on to know more about how these experienced consultants maximise your returns on supply chain optimisation projects:

Better understanding of the business

More often than not, most of the supply chain consulting companies run by professionals who have operations experience would bring lot of strategic and operative understanding of the business. This saves you lot of time, energy and resources, which you would have to spend otherwise in making a supply chain consultant understand the optimisation project and its end benefit. Consultants with operations experience are able to quickly understand and size-up the challenges and get to work on the optimisation solutions quickly, thus saving your time, effort and resources assisting you to improve your ROI on supply chain optimisation project.

Practical and implementable solutions

80-90% of supply chain optimisation projects fail because people who design these solutions have a bird’s eye view of operations and have scant idea of whether the solution is workable and how will it get implemented on the ground. Teams with operations experience know and understand ground realities of the operations and build these practical inputs as part of their solution design so that the chances of implementation failure are minimised. This not only shortens the implementation cycle to bring faster results on the table but also increases the chances of your success, thus maximising your ROI.

Taking responsibility for implementation

Most of the supply chain consulting companies do not take responsibility for implementation thus leaving it for the supply chain managers to do the job while they already have their day-to-day responsibilities. This not only delays the implementation thus procrastinating the benefits, but also increases the chances of implementation failure. Whereas supply chain optimisation consultants with operational experience are confident of their solutions and are ready to walk the extra mile by taking responsibility for implementation. This increases the chances of success while giving supply chain managers extra hand to manage the project without making their day-to-day job suffer.

Bring network relationships on table

Supply chain optimisation solutions need a lot of expert inputs from the industry to be effective and would continue to need these while implementing the solution. This is where the network of industry experts comes in handy for the supply chain consultants. While in their earlier employments, supply chain consultants build this important industry network and use the same network to keep on top of industry updates, seek advice while designing a solution or reach out to them while implementation. This network becomes available to you at no extra cost and hence keeps your investment low.

More economical

Supply chain optimisation projects can cost you a lot if you don’t choose the right consulting partner. Consultants with operational experience quickly know where to look for the problem and what would be the right solution, and hence are able to do the job in much lesser time. They also operate with no frills mindset and hence do not price themselves like usual high-flying consultants. These positive points bring down the cost of optimisation assignments substantially without compromising on the quality of deliverables.

There are many choices available to you from among different types of consulting companies while choosing to award your supply chain optimisation project. While cost remains an important criterion; knowledge of operations, quality of the solution, ability to implement on the ground, time for implementation are other things that should be considered. At the end of it, the success is not measured by having a thick report of the solution but having successfully implemented it on the ground with real benefits becoming visible, thus taking you towards maximising your ROI.

Started by professionals with vast and long experience in supply chain operations, Holisol has been designing, implementing and managing supply chain solutions for e-commerce, retail and manufacturing customers. Whether it’s warehousing, distribution, transportation, freight forwarding or supply chain IT, Holisol brings experience, expertise, relationships and innovation on the table while working like your own extended team.